[Federal Register Volume 68, Number 121 (Tuesday, June 24, 2003)]
[Notices]
[Pages 37517-37519]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 03-15882]


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DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

National Institute of Corrections


Solicitation for a Cooperative Agreement--Evaluation of the NIC 
Institutional Culture Initiative

AGENCY: National Institute of Corrections, Department of Justice.

ACTION: Solicitation for a cooperative agreement.

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SUMMARY: The Department of Justice (DOJ), National Institute of 
Corrections (NIC) announces the availability of funds in FY2003 for a 
cooperative agreement to develop and implement an evaluation design to 
assess the effectiveness of the National Institute of Corrections 
Institutional Culture Initiative (ICI). The ICI includes a prison 
culture assessment instrument as well as a protocol for assessing 
prison culture. The ICI also includes the following projects: Strategic 
Planning, Management and Response; and Leading and Sustaining Change as 
well as a wide spectrum of additional interventions which will be 
provided through NIC under the heading of Intensive Technical 
Assistance.
    A Cooperative Agreement is a form of assistance relationship where 
the National Institute of Corrections is substantially involved during 
the performance of the award. An award will be made to an organization 
that will, in collaboration with the Institute, design and implement an 
evaluation process to determine if the projects in NIC's ICI have 
positively impacted the culture of the prisons in the project.

DATES: Application must be received by 4 p.m. on Wednesday, July 23, 
2003.

ADDRESSES: Mailed applications must be sent to: Director, National 
Institute of Corrections, 320 First Street, NW., Room 5007, Washington, 
DC 20534. Applicants are encouraged to use Federal Express, UPS, or 
similar service to ensure delivery by the due date as mail at NIC is 
still being delayed due to decontamination procedures.
    Hand delivered applications should be brought to 500 First Street, 
NW., Washington, DC 20534. At the front desk, call (202)307-3106, 
extension 0 for pickup. Faxes or e-mailed applications will not be 
accepted.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: A copy of this announcement and the 
required application forms can be downloaded from the NIC Web site at 
www.nicic.org. Hard copies of the announcement can be obtained by 
calling Rita Rippetoe at 1-800-995-6423, extension 44222 or e-mail: 
[email protected]. Additionally, you may request packets of information 
on Institutional Culture Assessment Protocol and the Organizational 
Culture Assessment Instrument; Strategic Planning, Management and 
Response; and Leading and Sustaining Change from Sharon Floyd, 320 
First Street, NW., Room 5007, Washington, DC 20534. At your discretion 
you may purchase the Cameron and Quinn book cited in this Request for 
Proposal (RFP) through Prentice Hall.
    All technical or programmatic questions concerning this 
announcement should be directed to Randy Corcoran, Correctional Program 
Specialist, National Institute of Corrections. He can be reached by 
calling 1-800-995-6423, extension 40058 or by e-mail at 
[email protected].

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Background: Over the last several years, the 
NIC Prisons Division has responded to requests from prisons for 
assistance in addressing problems of staff sexual misconduct, excessive 
violence, high staff turnover rates and other types of problems. NIC's 
approach to assisting agencies with these problems has included on-site 
technical assistance, training programs and dissemination of 
information. Throughout the extensive work with institutions in 
addressing these problems, consistent themes from correctional staff 
and the offender population emerged, underscoring the importance of the 
institutional environment. Staff and inmate relations, consistent and 
fair supervisors, well trained staff, and strong institutional and 
agency leadership teams are some of the components critical to a 
healthy environment as highlighted by these projects. Other work done 
at NIC in the area of mission change of institutions and in identifying 
the challenges of keeping an effective workforce have also provided 
background for NIC's interest in institutional culture. The 
reoccurrence of many of these problems after traditional interventions 
has prompted NIC to examine more thoroughly the underlying causes of 
the presenting problems.
    Through a cooperative agreement, NIC developed an instrument and 
protocol for assessing organizational culture in prisons. The 
assessment instrument originated from the works of Kim S. Cameron and 
Robert E. Quinn in their book Diagnosing and Changing Organizational 
Culture which they based on the competing values framework. The 
instrument resulting from their work published in 1999 is called the 
Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). The OCAI was 
modified, with their approval, to be applied in prisons and is called 
the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument-Prisons (OCAI-P). The 
protocol and instrument have been applied in 12 prisons. NIC has 
concurrently been working on the development of intervention strategies 
intended to assist prisons in changing their cultures following the 
application of OCAI-P and Institutional Culture Assessment Protocol 
under the direction of NIC's existing Cooperative Agreement vendor.
    The three main intervention strategies being planned for 
utilization are: Strategic Planning, Management and Response; Leading 
and Sustaining Change and Intensive Technical Assistance which will 
provide a wide spectrum of additional interventions. The interventions 
strategies are being developed and are generally described below.
    1. Strategic Planning, Management and Response: A cooperative 
agreement was awarded in September 2002 to review Strategic Planning 
models being used by state departments of corrections and other public 
sector agencies and to select one Strategic Planning model that would 
be of greatest benefit to state departments of corrections and state 
prisons. The selected model, which is 50% complete, will be fully 
developed with all relevant materials that would be required for 
implementation in an operating correctional agency by the fall of 2003. 
A supplement to this cooperative agreement will test the model as well 
as develop and conduct a training program. In the training program 
twelve correctional professionals will learn how to facilitate use of 
the model in selected sites to improve prison culture.
    2. Leading and Sustaining Change: This cooperative agreement (the 
RFP will be announced in the Federal Register and on NIC's Web site 
shortly)

[[Page 37518]]

will provide for the implementation of a Change Leadership 
developmental process. This process will prepare/train the wardens and 
other correctional leaders who will be instrumental in changing the 
culture of the prisons participating in this initiative. In addition, 
it will provide for professional Change Advisors who will work with the 
wardens and other correctional leaders to determine the various 
strategies which will be implemented to effectively change the culture 
of the prison. The process will also provide options for assessing an 
institution's Readiness for Change and provide documentation of the 
stages of change for all the institutions. A final document summarizing 
``Lessons Learned'' about changing the culture of a state prison will 
be produced.
    3. Intensive Technical Assistance: This intervention category may 
cover a wide spectrum of assistance to prisons following an 
Institutional Culture Assessment. This assistance can take the form of 
training or consultation and may cover topics such as: management 
training, supervisor training as well as training in communications, 
diversity, sexual misconduct and use of force.
    Purpose: To design and implement an evaluation process to determine 
if the projects comprising the NIC Institutional Culture Initiative 
have positively impacted the culture of the prisons in the project.
    Scope of Project: 1. Develop an evaluation design which will 
determine whether the following projects positively impacted the 
culture of the prisons involved in the project: Institutional Culture 
Assessment, Leading and Sustaining Change, Strategic Planning and 
Response, and intensive technical assistance. The evaluation design 
should clearly identify all information/data/processes which need to be 
implemented at the beginning of each project in order to ultimately 
assess the project outcomes.
    2. Identify or develop all criteria, materials and instruments 
which will be utilized in the evaluation of each project.
    3. Discuss and defend the final decision regarding whether 
individual projects will need individual evaluation tools or whether 
common evaluation criteria/tools will be used on all the projects. 
Regardless of the decision, address how all of the projects will relate 
to the final outcome.
    4. Discuss the feasibility of determining the impact individual 
projects have on any institutional culture changes (for example, does 
having the warden and executive staff trained in Change Leadership 
contribute most significantly to changing the culture or are all 
interventions too integrated to isolate individual project 
contributions to the change in prison culture).
    5. Implement all aspects of the evaluation design on all projects 
and prison sites in the Institutional Culture initiative. Address how 
to implement the evaluation design in the projects which have been in 
progress for one or more years.
    6. Document the research design and data/information which is 
obtained in order to evaluate whether there has been a positive impact 
on the prison culture. Provide a Final Report and Executive Summary of 
the work completed in this phase of the evaluation project.
    Specific Requirements: 1. The awardee is required to become 
familiar with the materials, history, goals and results to date of 
NIC's work in the entire Institutional Culture Initiative to include 
all assessment and intervention efforts.
    2. An assessment of the prison culture in eight (8) correctional 
facilities was completed in 2002-2003, using the Organizational Culture 
Assessment Instrument--Prisons (OCAI-P). Four (4) additional prisons 
will receive assessments within the next few months. A professional 
Change Advisor/consultant will begin working with the wardens of these 
prisons to change the prison culture in September 2003. The awardee of 
this evaluation cooperative agreement will need to be prepared to 
identify and collect any baseline information which will be necessary 
for the successful evaluation of these projects and prisons.
    3. The Institutional Culture Assessment information (collected by a 
separate vendor) for each prison in the Institutional Culture 
Initiative will be made available to the awardee for the purposes of 
evaluating the impact of the projects. The applicant is encouraged to 
use this extensive information in the evaluation design. A modified 
version of the Assessment Protocol may be proposed as a means of 
measuring the impact of all the work done to change the culture or 
another means of measuring the impact may be proposed.
    4. The successful applicant will propose a project approach that 
will ensure accomplishment of each of the stated objectives of this 
project. The applicant will ensure that the project team is comprised 
of persons with technical expertise in the area of research and 
evaluation methods as well as persons with familiarity with the 
correctional environment.
    5. With satisfactory performance, it is assumed that there will be 
some additional funds each year for the awardee to collect information 
which will be necessary for the final impact evaluation. At that point 
in time, the awardee will be asked to provide a Final Report with an 
Executive Summary. They will also be asked to produce a camera-ready 
monograph on Lessons Learned about changing prison culture. Funds will 
be provided in subsequent years and should not be requested in the 
current application. The purpose of adding this information is to 
inform the applicant regarding the expected outputs to assure the 
research design addresses all requirements.
    6. Since the goal of the Institutional Culture initiative is to 
change the culture (not the climate) of a prison, there is the 
expectation that various interventions (strategic planing, intensive 
TA, etc.) may be utilized and may extend over a period of several 
years. The applicant should reflect the possibly longer time frame 
which will be required to measure the impact of the interventions in 
the evaluation design.
    7. The selected applicant will be required to attend a preliminary 
meeting for the purpose of getting an overview of the current NIC work 
in the Institutional Culture Initiative as well as a refinement of the 
project work plan. The applicant is also required to attend two (2) 
coordinating meetings each year with all the other project staff from 
the ICI.
    8. Coordinate with the NIC project manager extensively and 
routinely throughout the length of the project. The person designated 
as project director is required to be the person who will manage the 
project on a day-to-day basis and who has full decision-making 
authority to work with the NIC project manager. This person must have 
enough time dedicated to the project to assure they are available to 
direct day to day activities of the project and to be available for 
collaboration with the NIC project manager. Applicants may use whatever 
position titles they wish with other project staff, but the position of 
project director must be as described in this paragraph.
    9. Applicants should identify in the proposal specific strategies 
for assuring a collaborative effort between their project team and NIC.
    Application Requirements: Applications must be submitted using OMB 
Standard Form 424, Federal Assistance and attachments. (Copies can be 
downloaded from the NIC Web site at www.nicic.org. The applications 
should be concisely written, typed double spaced and referenced to the 
project by the ``NIC Application

[[Page 37519]]

Number'' and Title referenced in this announcement.
    Submit an original and five copies. The original should have the 
applicant's signature in blue ink. A cover letter must identify the 
responsible audit agency for the applicant's financial accounts.
    The narrative portion of this cooperative agreement application 
should include, at a minimum.
    1. A brief paragraph that indicates the applicant's understanding 
of the purpose of this cooperative agreement;
    2. One or more paragraphs to detail the applicants understanding of 
Impact Evaluation;
    3. A brief paragraph that summarizes the project goals and 
objectives;
    4. A clear description of the methodology that will be used to 
complete the project and achieve its goals;
    5. A clearly developed and detailed Project Plan which demonstrates 
how the various goals and objectives of the project will be achieved 
through its various activities so as to produce the required results;
    6. A chart of measurable project milestones and time lines for the 
completion of each milestone;
    7. A description of the staffing plan for the project, including 
the role of each project staff, the time commitment for each, the 
relationship among the staff (who reports to whom), and a signed 
statement from individual staff that they will be available to work on 
this project;
    8. A description of the qualifications of the applicant 
organization and documentation of each project staff's knowledge, 
skills and abilities to carry out their assigned project 
responsibilities;
    9. A budget that details all costs for the project, shows 
consideration for all contingencies for this project, and notes a 
commitment to work within the budget proposed (budget should be divided 
into object class categories as shown on application Standard Form 
424A). A budget narrative must be included which explains how all costs 
were determined.
    The project must be completed within one year of its award date.
    Authority: Public Law 93-415.
    Funds Available: The award will be limited to a maximum of 
$150,000.00 (direct and indirect costs). Funds may be used only for the 
activities that are linked to the desired outcome of the project. No 
funds are transferred to state or local governments. Additional funding 
will be requested in subsequent years. Future award decisions will be 
based upon satisfactory performance of the awarded and upon the 
availability of funding.
    This project will be a collaborative venture with the NIC Prisons 
Divisions.
    Eligibility of Applicants: An eligible applicant in any state or 
general unit of local government, private agency, educational 
institution, or organization, individual or team with expertise in the 
described areas.
    Review considerations: Applications received under this 
announcement will be subject to a 3 to 5 person NIC Peer Review 
Process. One of the reviewers will be from Bureau of Prisons staff. No 
companies, project staff or consultants who are working on any of the 
projects within the Institutional Culture Initiative as identified in 
the RFP, may participate in the evaluation which will be proposed in 
response to this RFP. The purpose for this restriction is to assure 
that the evaluation team is totally separate from any of the projects 
which will be evaluated.
    Numbers of Awards: 1.
    NIC Application Number: 03P23. This number should appear as a 
reference line in the cover letter, in box 11 of Standard Form 424, and 
outside of the envelope in which the application is sent.
    Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance Number: 16.602.
    Executive Order 12372: This project is not subject to the 
provisions of Executive Order 12372.
    This announcement is expected to be awarded by August 27, 2003.

Morris L. Thigpen,
Director, National Institute of Corrections.
[FR Doc. 03-15882 Filed 6-23-03; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 4410-36-M